Why is SpeedGrade performing so horribly?

[Chris_Liam_Ivey]

I'm still trying to square my experience with SpeedGrade with the rest of the Creative Cloud Suite: I just don't get it.  It's performing like the worst piece of software I've used in my entire life.  I actually brought in our IT support team (I work at a software company) to look at the issue on my PC.

The application has been slow for the past 6 months I've been using it, but it just got a lot worse.

My UI freezes completely every time I try to update a setting, and the UI refresh stops completely - apparently the entire application runs in a single thread - and then the screen goes blank as the program stops responding to the OS.  After 4 seconds or so, the screen comes back, and whatever control I was fiddling with has snapped to a new, and sometimes surprising position.  This is completely unusable.

I read that it might be because I'm using a 3rd-party LUT - which makes no sense, since it should be doint the same thing as built-in looks.  I read that I can convert a LUT to a "look", but I can't find any information on how to do that.

Is this possibly the source of my difficulty?

Why would this be so?

Does any professional actually use this software, or am I just being punked?

Help! I literally can't do my job, and I'm thinking maybe I have to get some other tool instead.

[R Neil Haugen · Accepted solution]

Some 3rd party LUTs work beautifully, and some ... don't. Which LUT from what company are you using?

To Save a Look ... it's the icon show thus in the bottom right of the Layer's palette, circled here under "Save" ...

... and it will 'save' it in the folder at the far right of the Looks panel, where you can click on the bottom 'name' and then type in your own appropriate name.

To Export a Look/LUT ... right-click on a Look icon, choose "Export" ... and you get the following dialog:

On hardware it 'likes', and with media and LUTs that it likes, it is fast and easy ... though rather more limited than say the Big Dog of current grading suites, Resolve. At first I was completely bamboozled, but then downloaded a book on using it by Alexis Van Hurkman and also went through a couple video tut's on lynda-dot-com.

I prefer it (generally) in the "Direct Link" mode, where it works directly from a PrPro project file, and there's no importing/conforming work to do ... vastly easier process. However, when they put it on "hiatus" status, they did not keep a "link" process from the newer PrPro programs. So 2015.2 is the last PrPro version that works with 2015.1 SpeedGrade that way. This did tick off some users ... you may see by scanning threads below.

One of the users, Patrick Zadrobilik from Austria, created a small program that is only a few Euros, and modifies one character in a PrPro project file of either 2015.3/4 or the newer 2017 versions so that SpeedGrade works from those as in standard Direct Link mode. You then run the saved project file back through his little program, and it re-converts the header to the newer version. Works great .. . except for AE comps. Those need to be fully rendered/replaced out of AE into the PrPro sequence.

Further advice on Sg ... I can give, plus of course you can scan the threads for discussions of many things.

SpeedGrade is an ... intriguing ... program. Interesting history, and as I've met and worked with one of the two co-creators (Patrick Palmer) at NAB several times, I've had the full info on the history pre-Adobe and to the present. It was originally called Iridas, and the SpeedGrade moniker got attached on purchase from Adobe.

The original code is rather unique, true ... and it can be a picky sot for what hardware it "likes". PrPro will run adequately on say a lot of laptops that Sg won't run on at all. In those, the GPU isn't up to what Sg demands, so the program loads ... you just don't see any image in the program monitor. The code was designed to be as simple as possible ... using very sparse command language, I guess you could say. And is somewhat antiquated at this point. So Sg is officially on "hiatus" while Adobe is considering options ... do the complete rebuild of the program it really needs at this point, or EOL the thing.

At Adobe's MAX conference the first week of this November, there were a couple people high enough within the Adobe video apps to have some knowledge, who insisted that it's in the same "spot" that Audition was a cycle or so back ... that program was not updated through 2-3 cycles while they pondered, and the decision there was to go ahead and build anew, resuscitating that program. And that this same thing could happen with Sg.

One of the major colorists teaching/presenting at the conference (though not an Adobe employee, of course) put it that to him, it's in the coffin ... they just haven't put it in the ground yet.

I prefer optimism, personally, though at times ... that's not optimistic of me. Ha.

The Lumetri color workspace within PrPro is good for many simpler things, but ... hath it's limitations, especially the lack of auto-help for shot-matching (and no real 2/3-up, though you can sort of fake it by making a new custom workspace) ... and the ability to only have one HSL per "instance" of Lumetri. Oh ... and with multiple 'instances' of Lumetri, the color panel and external control surfaces only work with the last instance, you need to use the Effects Control panel to go back and modify settings on earlier 'instances'.

There's always ... Resolve, of course. Which does require exporting XML/EDL out of PrPro, and conforming your media to the sequences over in Resolve ... which can take hours for more major projects. But Resolve does have a TON more tools 'enclosed'.

Neil

[Chris_Liam_Ivey]

Dear Neil,

Thanks for taking the time to put together such a comprehensive reply.

I was using the Osiris LUTs from Color Grading Central.  I discovered that the installers created for them were for CreativeCloud pre-2015, which meant they didn't work for me.  Manually copying the .cube files to the correct folders didn't seem to work either, so I had to manually browse to the folder where they lived every time I wanted to apply them.  It also meant that saving a "look" seemed to also roll in the entire stack of corrections, so... I gave up.

To finish my project, I ended up having to use type-ins for all of the grading values, since the fancy UI would simply freeze up and then reward me with a random setting.

I'll have to look into Resolve: I'm not an expert, and I hate complicating workflow, but this was absolutely ridiculous.  It took me two whole days to grade a 6 minute sequence.

[Chris_Liam_Ivey]

PS - the performance issue doesn't seem to have anything to do with the GPU at all.  It seems like the entire application runs in a single thread, and then locks one of my 8 cores at 100% utilization.

[R Neil Haugen]

Yea, the Osiris LUTs have been mentioned as problems before here. Sometimes working for some, sometimes not so much for others. I don't know why.

I do know that another user posted that they could get the Osiris LUT to 'load' within PrPro's Lumetri panel, and then, with that as the only 'setting' made in that panel, right-click the three little bars by the tab name of "Lumetri", select "Export Look", and the output of that would work within Sg.

That said, I've found that as I learned Sg, I could make Looks & LUTs to do as needed, from within Sg, for most things I'd use them for. But for say, re-creating the soft look & roll-off of a late 70's film-stock, well ... that's where something like a purchased LUT can really do the trick righteous & fast.

And SpeedGrade allows you to put such a LUT at the 'top' of the layer stack, so you can work below it to 'feed' it the proper signal, so that it keeps your desired look. Which is spiffy.

Neil